Anatoly Yakovenko Refutes the View that ZK Proofs Can Speed Up Blockchain

Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko stated that zero-knowledge proofs (ZK proofs) do not automatically increase the speed of blockchain operations, but only reduce costs when duplication costs become a bottleneck. He pointed out that local transaction processing is usually faster than network verification due to higher memory bandwidth. According to a 2023 IEEE study, this speed advantage can be 10–100 times faster than network latency.

Yakovenko noted that if the size of the transaction data is smaller than the amount of state change data, then downloading and executing locally would be more efficient than relying on ZK proofs. This contrasts with market expectations for ZK in high-performance networks (like Solana), where duplication costs are almost negligible (costing only $0.00000512 per vote on 10,000 machines). His view aligns with Solana's design philosophy of pursuing low-latency, high-throughput consensus, in contrast to Ethereum's Beam Chain proposal, which uses ZK to optimize environments with high duplication costs.

Zero-knowledge proofs (ZK proofs) are a cryptographic technique that allows one party to prove that it knows or has correctly completed something without revealing the original data.

In blockchain, ZK proofs are commonly used to:

Enhance privacy (hide transaction information);

Reduce the amount of data transmitted during verification (but as Yakovenko pointed out, this does not always make systems faster).